Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Progress, as explained by the City of Chicago’s 2017 CAFR: “…net position may serve over time as a useful indicator of a government’s financial position. In the case of the City, liabilities and deferred inflows exceeded assets by $28,368.1 million at December 31, 2017. “